One of the nearly-unavoidable hazards of traditional print production seems to be the way that important details can go out of date almost as soon as the book is published (and this situation has only deteriorated as we’ve started including more and more references to fundamentally ephemeral digital media!)

In the case of my own Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing (later ebook edition here) the key piece of information was the call to action involving the PlantTracker app. Within just a couple of years, this fantastically useful citizen science tool started going buggy when it was defunded by the Environment Agency, and finally disappeared from view altogether.

Now, the good news is that the Natural Apptitude team behind PlantTracker have launched the new INNS Mapper app and website – complete with lots of the data that citizen scientists like me had loaded onto the previous platform.

Better still, INNS Mapper goes way beyond plants, enabling volunteers to report sightings and management of 62 different INNS, including invertebrates and mammals as well as aquatic and terrestrial plant species.

(Upon close inspection, the reporting options don’t yet map completely to all the species which I discussed with the GB Non-Native Species Secretariat before flagging up in Balsam Bashing – such as the Asian hornet, which recently seems to be establishing a worrying bridgehead in the south of England –  but it’s certainly a very good start).

Check out the INNS Mapper website here, and let’s all make the most of this new citizen science data hub to take the fight to invasive non-native species even more effectively from now on.

Way back in 2013 when I started discussing my Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing with Merlin Unwin Books, we decided very quickly that we wanted it to make it as easy as possible to carry and use – which is why we released the first edition in a handy little ring-bound format, just like Peter Lapsley’s and Cyril Bennett’s earlier Pocket Guide to Matching the Hatch.

Since then, of course, technology has moved on, and the proliferation of electronic readers (including mobile phones) means the time is right for a handy new ebook version of Balsam Bashing…

… making it easier than ever to carry this guidebook with you in the field, and grab every opportunity to fight back against invasive non-native plants and animals.

Balsam Bashing’s new digital edition also contains a few timely updates (for instance, new research on controlling signal crayfish, and the latest range of successful volunteer projects across the country).

My ebook Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing is now available direct via Merlin Unwin Books and all good ebook retailers, and Orvis is generously running a summer series of talks and giveaways across their UK shops to help us promote this new publication.

Click here to download yours for £4.99 today, and join the battle against Himalayan balsam, Pontic rhododendron, Canada geese, grey squirrels, ring-necked parakeets and many other invasive non-native species!

Especially if you’re an angler, invasive non-native species can really spoil your day.

From giant hogweed on the banks (with phyto-phototoxic sap which inflicts third-degree burns that’ll keep coming back for years) to signal crayfish and killer shrimp in the water (which destroy the food web from the bottom up by chewing through all the native invertebrates) very few of our rivers, streams and lakes are immune to the impacts of these unwanted invaders once they’ve gained a foothold.

Luckily, there’s almost always something we can do to fight back, and I’m proud to say that my very first article for Trout & Salmon magazine addresses this issue of saving our fishing (not to mention most of our native aquatic ecosystems) for the future.

Now available at all good newsagents, the Know How section of the Trout & Salmon May 2017 issue includes my feature on dealing with Himalayan balsam, giant hogweed, floating pennywort, Japanese knotweed, mink, signal crayfish, Ponto-Caspian shrimp and Pontic rhododendron.

Thanks to Andrew Flitcroft and James Beeson, my Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing also gets a mention in the Tackle Talk section, and my publishers Merlin Unwin Books are offering two copies of Balsam Bashing for the price of one until 6 July (one to keep for yourself, and one to give away to friends and family).

Just call 01584 877 456 quoting ‘Trout & Salmon’ to claim this generous offer… and maybe tell ‘em I sent you…

Hard to believe a year has passed since my Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing was published, yet this is already the second summer when it’s been helping ordinary members of the public to start fighting back against invasive non-native species (INNS) in their local areas.

Now balsam (and floating pennywort, rhododendron, mink, grey squirrel etc…) bashing time is here again, my publishers at Merlin Unwin Books have come up with this brilliant offer to help local environmental groups including Rivers Trusts, Wildlife Trusts, Trout in the Town cells and conservation volunteers of all kinds to keep spreading the word about the battle against INNS.

When you buy 10 or more copies, you’ll pay just £5.00 per book – saving a full £2.99 off the usual RRP of £7.99.

The Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing was written in close consultation with Defra’s Non-Native Species Secretariat, so it’s still the single most comprehensive guide to local action on INNS that’s available to anyone who’s not actually employed by Defra, Natural England, the Environment Agency, or their equivalents in Scotland and Ireland.

To take advantage of this great offer, and help spread the knowledge about INNS around your local environmental group, just call Merlin Unwin Books on 01584 877 456.

(Alternatively, if you’d prefer a single signed and dedicated copy, plenty of those are also available from my Urbantrout online shop).

Thanks for your support, and let’s carry on spreading the word and getting out there after those INNS this summer!

It’s not every day you get interviewed on your home water for an international fishing ezine. So when Germany’s SCALE Magazine offered to send writer-translator Tankred Rinder (also editor of Forelle und Aesche) and photographer Veit Dresmann to south London as part of their round-the-UK road trip in September…

… I jumped at the chance to catch up with Tankred again and tell him more about London trout and the Wandle restoration project in general.

Click here to read our interview in English or German (pages 152 to 165, complete with work-in-progress shots of the Carshalton stretch of the upper Wandle) in the December 2014 issue.

Where has this summer gone? Between publication of my Balsam Bashing book, a few freelance copywriting gigs up in London, helping to recruit new staff for the Wandle and South East Rivers Trust and watching over the Wandle’s biggest river restoration projects yet, experimenting with a radical new approach to ultralight fly-fishing, and exploring new stretches of the Exe, Usk and Wiltshire Avon, several months have suddenly disappeared downstream.

Fish were caught (sometimes quite unexpectedly – maybe more on that soon), the bank balance looks a little healthier, and I took a few good photos, but what else happened in that time?

Well… I did get some other writing done.

First up, I’ve been highly honoured to have my work included in the launch issue of a new magazine that takes a robust and novel approach to niche publication. Publisher and designer Garrett Fallon believes (not without reason, and not unlike many other genres) that angling literature has become debased, devalued and even economically unviable in this still-young age of the internet. So he’s set out to swim against that current with a new print magazine, Fallon’s Angler, which aims to commission proper long-copy articles and recompense their authors properly for their time and effort.

Particularly in this context, it’s quite a thrill to see my biography (and my article on a wildwood stretch of the River Meon) appearing alongside fishing-writing superstars like Tom Fort, Chris Yates, Jeff Hatt and Dom Garnett, and I hope there’ll be plenty more opportunities in the future. If you’d like to see this noble experiment survive and thrive, copies of Fallon’s Angler are available here for just £8 each.

By contrast, both of my other pieces of fishing and environmental writing this summer have been published in almost-conventional ezines. Apart from the club blogs which I used to edit, electronic publishing is a new departure for the Wandle Piscators, but the first issue of my local fishing club’s ezine is a real cracker, a 58-page blockbuster including my own article on the Fish Where You Live philosophy which seems to underpin the whole human angle of urban river restoration:

For me, as I’m sure for many members of the Wandle Piscators, the phrase Fish Where You Live means the simple luxury of being able to wander out of my own front door on a summer’s evening, strung-up rod in hand, for an hour or two of headspace and fishing on a river that’s preferably no more than an easy walk away, even in the middle of one of the world’s great cities. 

Even if we didn’t fully recognise it at the time, I think this was the original vision of the Wandle restoration project: to get this former sewer back to a state where it could once again be a place for people to fish where they lived…

The full article starts on page 19 of the Piscators’ Chronicle, and there are plenty of articles by other club members too: mountaineering in Slovenia, fly tying and riverfly monitoring on the Wandle, barbel fishing on the Severn, chub on the little-known Beverley Brook…

Finally, for now, do you remember all that rain at the start of this year? Since 2005 I’ve been contributing very occasional environmental articles to the Redstone Review, a locally-based but globally-interested paper edited on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains by Susan De Castro McCann.

For obvious reasons, flooding is still a big topic along Colorado’s St Vrain River, and my article on the UK perspective appears on page 17 of the May/June issue of the Redstone. At the end of the driest September since records began, and only a few months after I wrote this piece, it already feels oddly dated (floods of chalk groundwater in Kenley High Street, anyone?). But I guess that was exactly my closing argument:

Like it or not, human memories have always been desperately short, and what we like to rationalise as a comfortable temperate zone can sometimes throw a spectacular tantrum, even without wild cards like climate change and all the other things we still don’t know about our little blue planet. 

Maybe the best we can hope for is courage to do what the scientists tell us, and find a house on a hill, but still not too far from a trout stream, on the odds that they’ll be right.

(Photo 1: Fallon’s Angler)

A couple of months have passed since my Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing was published in May this year, and it’s been great to see it gradually gaining traction across the environmental sector.

Here’s what the reviewers have been saying so far:

Neil Patterson in Fly Fishing & Fly Tying magazine: 

Stuffed with essential facts and lavishly illustrated, Pike’s easy-to-read style tells us what each of our Public Enemies No 1, 2 and 3 are, where they come from, how to recognise them, what damage they cause and, importantly, what you can do about them. More than a quiet nature ramble, Balsam Bashing is a rallying call…

Sorry, we can no longer plead ignorance.

Andrew Herd in Waterlog magazine:

Every now and then a book drops through the letter box for review and makes me smack my forehead and say, ‘Why didn’t I think of that!’  With this new Merlin Unwin pocket guide, the Ludlow publisher has unleashed one of my favourite authors, the phenomenal Theo Pike, on the awful
subject of invasive non-native species. If ever a book was needed, this one surely must qualify… I will warn you in advance that the contents are pretty alarming, but hopefully the publication of this excellent little guide will act as a wake-up call…

A milestone of a book, let’s see more from you, Theo.

Peter Smitham on Fly Fishers’ Republic:

‘Pocket guide’ is very apt as this tiny tome has found its way neatly into my Barbour jacket along with bird guide and travel binoculars! …

Extensive and enlightening in content, definitely one for the bookshelf (pocket) of every environmentally concerned nature lover.

Ian Welch on Fish&Fly and FishingMagic:

Empowering people to engage with and protect their environment at grassroots level is a tall order but Theo achieves it in an easy-to-read format and this is a book that should not just be in the pocket of every angler but also every gardener, rambler, birder…

It may be pocket-sized but this is a giant first step in getting the public to fight back and take responsibility for their environment.

Pete Tyjas on Eat, Sleep, Fish:

Angling writer Theo Pike has followed up his most excellent Trout in Dirty Places with a well thought out and very useful guide… easy to use and of a size that will fit in a fishing bag or fishing waistcoat pocket…

All in all, it is a really great book that tells us about the impact invasive species have on our environment but more importantly tells us what we can do about them. Good work Theo.

Bob Male in the Grayling Society’s Journal:

A thoroughly useful and timely book, free from scaremongering and exaggeration, and strongly recommended for anglers, river keepers and watchers, and for anyone interested in natural history and the protection of our wildlife.

Tankred Rinder on Forelle und Aesche:

Citizen participation in its purest form…  A handy pocket guide which every nature-lover concerned about the invasion of non-native species should carry with them.

Audrey Watson in BASC’s Shooting and Conservation magazine:

A mine of sound, practical advice. If you are helping to manage a shoot or a fishery, or even your own garden, it is essential reading.

Jeffrey Prest in Trout Fisherman magazine:

Like some kind of bathroom cleaner, Theo Pike is getting a reputation for getting into those corners of fishing that other writers won’t reach. First he departs from the sweet meadows and pure streams of angling cliche to bring us Trout in Dirty Places, a celebration of those urban rivers that now hold fish where they once held only toxins.  Now his latest book looks at nature’s dark side and the world of uninvited interlopers… 

It shouldn’t be anything like as interesting as it is, especially not with a reviewer whose fascination for botany and insects stops at tobacco leaves and Spiderman. Pike and his publishing team however, have an eye for pace and colour, both in the content of his books and the way they are laid out. Trout in Dirty Places bounced along and so does Balsam Bashing, when it could have easily been a dry read that looked like it came straight from the hands of a Defra committee.

Big thanks to everyone who’s reviewed Balsam Bashing so far, as well as all those who’ve been buying copies (and hopefully putting them to good use out there in the great British countryside)… with luck I’ll be able to add even more reviews to this list as they appear.

According to the great John Gierach, publishers may well have invented book signings to keep writers humble… and that’s certainly how it felt for the first five spookily-quiet minutes of Coch-y-Bonddu’s  ‘meet the author’ session during this year’s CLA Game Fair at Blenheim.

Maybe we’re putting them off, suggested Peter Hayes, all sitting here looking like experts. So Peter, Dom Garnett, Malcolm Greenhalgh and I started chatting among ourselves instead, and it wasn’t long before a swarm of grinning acquaintances emerged from the crowd to accuse us jovially of neglecting our public. You can’t have it all ways… but it’s entertaining to try.

Thanks to all those good folks at Coch-y-Bonddu and the Angling Trust, my day in the Game Fair’s Fishing Village passed in a blur of book signings, too-quick catch-ups and some degree of sardonic speculation (does his Grace know he’s got invasive signal crayfish duking it out with native damsel nymphs in his lake, and a Himalayan balsam problem near Gate C?)

Between fits of writerly responsibility I did manage some reciprocal sneaking across the road to see the gang the Wild Trout Trust stand, as well as the Wandle Piscators at the Fly Dressers’ Guild… and a stroll down the hill at the end of the day to check out a couple of rods I’ve been reading about recently in Jeremy Lucas’ latest book, Presentation Fly Fishing.

(I’ve fished ultralight for years, but having been generously sent a sample of Jeremy’s revolutionary dry fly presentation leaders, I’m happy to admit that his super-delicate leader-to-hand technique is more than a few light years beyond. So now I wanted to get hands and eyes on the long, ultralight Streamflex XF2s – Euro comp-style 10ft 2wt and 11ft 3wt respectively – which he praises so passionately for casting those leaders).

As luck would have it, dropping in on the Hardy & Greys stand also led to a fascinating chance meeting with pro staffer Finlay Wilson, whose articles on Scottish rivers and the Flow Country I’ve been enjoying for years in the pages of Trout & Salmon and FF&FT.  Neither of us were actually packing a French or Lucas-style leader to throw onto those lovely little XF2s, but with luck it won’t be too many seasons before we’re comparing big fish on crazy-light rigs somewhere on the Tweed or Annan. Or maybe somewhere grittier…

And isn’t that mostly the point of the Game Fair? You never quite know who you’ll run into, but you can always predict it’ll be fun.

To celebrate the launch of my new Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing this week, I’ve been highly honoured to set out my stall at two separate Sportfish events…

… first an all-day signing session at Farlows on publication day (complete with wine and snacks generously laid on by Brian Fratel and Sam) …

… and then sharing a stand with Fishpal’s effervescent Anne Woodcock on the Saturday of this year’s Sportfish Show.

To say we were at the epicentre of the fair’s energy doesn’t start to describe it, with Orvis on one side, Savage Gear on the other, and all the big guns from Sage and Rio (Marc Bale, Travis Campbell and my old casting guru Simon Gawesworth – not the first time I’ve mentioned him and the Sportfish Show in the same sentence!) immediately opposite.

Many other good pals including Paul Sharman, William Daniel, Funky Toby Merigan, Mark Hamnett, Charles Jardine, Mark Anderson and Graham Waterton also dropped by for a chat and a signed copy or three…

… and all too soon it was time to hit the road back to south London again, to get ready for early morning riverfly monitoring and helping to run this month’s Wandle Trust river cleanup. (If you make a career in writing and river restoration, that’s the deal you apparently sign up for… and I wouldn’t live it any other way).

Big thanks to Allan Shepherd, Chris Ryan and everyone at Farlows and Sportfish for their massive enthusiasm and support this week. Balsam Bashing time is officially here!

Invasive non-native species of all kinds, be very afraid. Today’s the day when my new Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing officially gets let out to start kicking your ass in the wild.

Me? I’ll mostly be spending the day at Farlows in central London, hoping to sign a few copies and chat about invasive species with anyone who’ll allow me to bend their ear.

So far, everyone who’s read the book has been overwhelmingly complimentary (for instance, click these links to read Ian Welch’s reviews on Flyfishing.co.uk and FishingMagic), and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed re-examining my own background thinking in this latest instalment of my Urbantrout Diaries series, even if some of the prognoses for our native species seem to be getting more alarming every day.

Even if you can’t make today’s event, please do pick up a copy from my publishers or your local bookshop, and let me know what you think via the comments section below this post. Invasive non-native species are known to be a gnarly subject, and all discussion of how to handle them has got to be a good thing!

Update: After a great launch day at Farlows, I’m thrilled to have been invited to do another signing session at the Sportfish Show tomorrow.

(Saturday only – there’s a Wandle Trust river cleanup to help run on Sunday! – so if you’re at Theale, look out for the bright yellow books and stop by to say hello)

(Photo: Duncan Soar)